Today let us celebrate text.
Imagine a world without text. Imagine that the only way to publish information, ideas, and stories is through audio or video.
I don’t want to live in that world.
Give me text. Let me see prose—words, sentences, paragraphs. Let me scan, skim, savor, review, and reread at will.
The spoken word is wonderful. Images are priceless. But they will never replace published text.
Like Joshua Kim says:
Text is our most efficient mechanism for creating and sharing ideas. The information density of text is unsurpassed by any other medium.
Do you ever get frustrated with bloggers who post audios or videos instead of writing? I do. I can’t scan video or audio posts to decide if they’re worth my attention. I can’t look for subheadings that clue me in to the main points. I can’t skip the long, rambling introductions and filter out the fluff.
You want to publish audio and video? Fine. But please respect my time. Include a transcript.
Give me text.
When the stakes are high — a contract, the script for a film that will cost millions to make, a peace treaty — we put in writing. Text is the medium of human agreement.
Text is a timeless tool for making sense of our world. Text is the medium par excellence for developing, refining, and testing ideas.
Speakers can dish out nonsense and get away with it. Politicians can utter non-sequiturs and still get elected. Writers don’t have this luxury. With text, the bar is much higher. Bullshit is likely to be exposed when it sits frozen on a page, subject to scrutiny by readers who slow down to ask: What’s really being said here? Is it true?
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell is a timeless statement of this idea. Text is on the front line of our defense against tyranny.
I’ve lived long enough to see many waves of writing technology come and go.
For my first tech writing job, I wrote my drafts by hand. Our secretary typed them up on an IBM Selectric typewriter. We revised drafts on paper and typed it all up again and again.
Then there were Wang word processors. These weren’t apps. These were big, clunky workstations dedicated solely to creating, revising, and publishing text.
Eventually we graduated to mainframe computers with early writing software. I remember Wordstar: It created plain text, period. All of its keyboard commands were listed at the top of every screen. I was in awe.
In 1987 I bought my first personal computer — an IBM compatible made by a company called Leading Edge. It had 256k of memory. It connected to a dot-matrix printer, which meant that we had to burst and trim the printouts. I wrote entire books on that thing. I loved it.
I mention this ancient history for one reason. At every stage of the way I heard predictions for the future: Print was dead. Books were dead.
And eventually, text was dead:
I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion. There seems no going back now. For text, the writing is on the wall — Farhad Manjoo, Welcome to the Post-Text Future
Bullshit.
Print books outsell digital books.
The internet is mostly text.
Every new wave of technology leads to more text, not less.
As long as there are humans, there will be text.
Text is a visual medium. You see it with your eyes.
Type is highly designed. Your response to text is deeply influenced by details such as font choice, type size, and line and character spacing.
I learned this while writing my novel Bodywork. My choices about where to break up paragraphs were visual decisions. So were choices about when to use commas and where to place periods. Those tiny decisions could make or break a line of dialogue, a scene, or a whole chapter.
One reason I love novels is that they’re the ultimate minimal medium — words on pages. Some people look at novels and see amorphous blocks of solid text. I see a complex array of visual decisions that is as intricate and beautiful as any painting or photograph.
I interact with text in two primary ways — capturing and revising.
When people tell me that they’re not creative, I ask them: Do you have a way to capture ideas on the run?
Ideas are not well-behaved. They show up uninvited at the oddest moments, often when I’m not “working.” So, I always have my phone and Apple Notes handy. Other people use different apps, or a Moleskin notebook. Whatever works.
Creative people are not smarter than the rest of us. They’re just obsessed with capturing ideas. They get a lot of raw material that way.
Revision is often described as a form of drudgery that borders on self-torture. Sometimes I’ve experienced it that way, especially on a tight deadline.
Drudgery not inevitable, however.
My workflow is optimized for joy. I don’t polish text. I play with it. I look for words to cut. I move paragraphs around. I change vague words to concrete nouns and replace passive verbs with active ones. It’s like wandering through a big open field and picking a flower here and there.
One of my biggest discoveries is that my mind can be tricked. When faced with a piece of writing to revise, I tell myself: I’m not really going to work on this. I’m just going to take a minute and make it a tiny bit better.
Once I start tinkering, I get hooked. I sink into the process with no resistance. I just fooled me.
Don’t underestimate play. Watching my grandson reminds me that play can be focused and intense, an effortless pathway to lifelong learning.
Writers create text. We rule the world. It is our privilege to work in this sacred medium.
I spend my days reading and writing text. Occasionally I’m surprised by how much I enjoy this, by how passionately I feel about it. Interacting with text is a way of being in the world and a spiritual practice, one that transforms me and regularly puts me in flow.
Thank God for text.
Oh this is perfect I can see how you think and feel with this post.